Create An Advanced Chinese Lantern Icon In Photoshop & Illustrator

In this tutorial we will be using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop for our icon design. This tutorial is rated advanced for those who are beginners in these programs I would recommend checking out some of our easier tutorials to start out with. Our basic shapes will start out with illustrator then we can export them over to photoshop to polish, add texture and finalize our icon.

This is what our final icon will look like.

So we’ll just dive right into it, fire up illustrator and create a new web document 800×800 or whatever size you feel comfortable working with (These shapes can be resized later).

Initial Sketch

I initially started with a sketch idea with paper and pencil then scanned it and imported it into illustrator to get a basic outline of our icon. By doing this, it saves time from having to draw something from scratch on Illustrator. If you sketch something you don’t like just trash it and start over. The main rule is to never take over 10 minutes per sketch, their suppose to be quick drawings, just to get an idea of what I want.

Now I know what kind of shape I want my lantern to take I can start using our shape tools to create the base of our lantern. I start with an ellipse tool to make the actual lantern shape, click and drag an oval shape and fill it with black for the time being.

After you’ve filled in your shape grab your pen tool , draw out the top metal handle of our lantern, fill it with black as well.

After you’ve created the top handle go ahead and duplicate the layer and then flip it upside down Object > Transform

Now grab your rectangle tool and draw a small vertical rectangle for our tassle. After, grab your ellipse tool again and draw a small circle for the ball on our tassle.

Moving on, grab your rounded corner tool and change your rounded corner radius to 12px and draw a small rectangle and select the bottom half with your direct selection tool and delete them. After you’ve created the shape get your rectangle tool again and create another vertical rectangle for the tassle strings.

Now create the same shape you did for the top metal tassle (Just duplicate the same shape and make it a bit bigger). Duplicate the same layer and position it directly over the same shape but this time color it white, then horizontally resize it a bit smaller.

Now we’re going to remove the front so we get a nice unique shape for our handle. Open up your path finder box and hit the remove front button.

Time to save your work (Although you should’ve already saved if your a good designer!). Now we’re going to export our work into photoshop to continue onto coloring and polishing it.

Exporting Into Photoshop

Doing this is super easy. Make sure you have Photoshop opened and create a new document. Select each item from Illustrator (one by one) and drag it over to your new palette in Photoshop. Now that we have all our pieces on Photoshop (you might have to put them back together) we can start coloring our lantern.

Select the top metal piece of of our lantern and apply a gradient effect – Here are the following colors chosen #cd733f, #e4b848 and white. I repeated the colors in a way to make the metal look shiny and reflective.

Here’s what you should get…

Now we’re going to add texture to our metal piece to give it a more realistic look so go back into Illustrator and drag the same piece into Photoshop once again. Now goto Filter > Noise > Add Noise and use the settings below.

Select the layer to Overlay and set the Opacity to 10% and now you have a realistic looking gold metal! Now what you can do is duplicate these layers and flip them vertically and size them down for the bottom metal part.

Time to color the top handle part of our lantern. Use the same colors as used in the metal we just created.

Now that we have the metal parts finished, we can move onto coloring the oval base where the main focus will be. Here are the colors used for the gradient: #f98526 and #bf191d. Now just add a radial gradient with the settings and colors below.

Here’s what it should look like…

Now we’re going to color the tassel metal pieces. Just use two different grays, Ill let you pick which ones you want to do. The higher the contract between the grays the more shiney it can seem but don’t go too far or it’ll look unrealistic. We’re also going to color the tassel’s ball with a yellow gradient.

Add yellow to our tassel.

Now, we’re going to add little creases to our lantern because that’s how the paper ones are made. What I did was start off with a black shape of the base lantern and resized it a little bit, hallowed out the center and, duplicated and resized over and over. When your finished redo the same process but with white and set their Opacity low. Change your black layer to Color Dodge so you get a blended effect.

Time to texture our lantern with an actual picture of a paper lantern. With a simple google image search for Chinese Paper Lantern we can find many choices, I randomly picked one that I thought would go well with our icon –

I cut the lantern out of the black and squished it vertically just a little bit to fit the contour of our lantern – Credit goes to Joern Clark for the photo.

Now set your photo layer to Overlay and Opacity to 60%.

Create a new layer and select your brush tool and hit your hotkey “D” to reset your colors so the foreground is black. Now draw across your top metal piece like my picture below, be sure not to draw to low – We’re trying to create a subtle shadow underneath the metal piece.

Now just put that layer underneath your top metal piece layer and now we got a nice shadow underneath our lantern.

Now we have a good looking Chinese paper lantern!

Our Final Polished Product

Make sure to group all these layers, duplicate and flatten (to make sure we have a workable backup) and save. After some color dodging, color burning, erasing parts of the tassel and a fancy background with a drop shadow on the lantern layer. Our final product is finished!

Drawing, Graphic Design, Icons, Illustrator, Tutorial